A virtual reality (VR) system replicates an environment that simulates physical presence in places in the real world or an imagined world using entirely-computer-generated three-dimensional (3D) imagery of “scenes” within this world. Similarly, an augmented reality (AR) system “augments” physical presence in the real world through computer-generated 3D imagery that overlies contemporaneously captured imagery of the real world. Thus, VR and AR systems both seek to provide an accurate sense of “presence” in the real, augmented, or imagined world. Typically, this sense of presence is facilitated through the use of a head mounted display (HMD), tablet, smartphone, or other user-portable display device that displays imagery that provides a two dimensional (2D) or 3D representation of a scene in the represented world, where the presented scene reflects the user's relative perspective of the scene based on the user's current pose (that is, the location and orientation of the user-portable display device relative to a reference coordinate frame for the depicted scene).
User-portable display devices display this imagery as a sequence of display frames, each display frame rendered based on a corresponding detected pose of the device and persisting for a particular period of time. However, as the display device is user-portable, a user typically is able to move freely about and thus the pose of the display device may significantly change between display frames. As such, the imagery displayed at the display device at a particular point in time may lag behind the user's movements. This dissonance between the user's perceived orientation within a scene and the orientation of the perspective of the scene presented on the display device can lead to user disorientation, or what is often referred to as “virtual reality sickness”, particularly in the context of HMDs and other 3D display devices. Thus, to reduce or eliminate user disorientation and thereby provide improved presence, VR and AR systems seek to minimize the “motion-to-photon latency”; that is, the latency between a user's movement and when photons representing a scene from in the resulting new pose hit the user's eye.